Can my gas fireplace keep my house warm through a long power outage?
In Arden, plenty of the 1980s and '90s homes in Royal Pines and Skyland have open masonry fireplaces — and here's the hard truth for an outage: an open firebox can actually run a net heat loss, pulling more warm air up the flue than it radiates back. On the natural-gas main here, a sealed insert flips that into real backup heat.
The open-firebox problem
An open masonry fireplace looks like the obvious thing to lean on when the power's out, but it's often the opposite — the same open flue that lets smoke escape also lets your heated room air rush up the chimney, and on a cold night an open fire can leave the rest of the house colder, not warmer. That's why we steer Arden homeowners toward a sealed gas insert or a sealed wood insert: it drops into the existing opening and turns a heat-losing hole in the wall into an appliance that keeps the room warm with the grid down.
On the main, the fuel keeps coming
Arden sits on Buncombe County's natural-gas network, which is the ideal fuel for outage backup — the main keeps delivering whether or not your power is up, so a millivolt or battery-backup insert runs as long as the outage lasts, no tank to monitor. A Napoleon Oakville insert slides into your existing firebox, seals it, adds battery-backup ignition, and gives you heat that ignores the grid — the fireplace itself couldn't care less how long the lines are down.
Homes and Biltmore Park alike
Biltmore Park's retail and office spaces get the same treatment — sealed gas heat that holds a room through an outage. We pull the Buncombe County permit, pressure-test the line, and meet the inspector, and we're just 15 minutes south. Call (828) 770-8079 or come see inserts working at our Asheville showroom.
Fireplace help in Arden
We install and service fireplaces throughout Arden and the rest of Buncombe County.